The text that follows was written at 9:17 PM on May 28, 2016. This day, May 29th, has essentially just been a very long extension of Saturday. This rambling prose was written before the 12:30 AM blueberry muffin pancakes at a Spokane Denny’s. It was also written before I was scrunched up in the backseat of my Ford Edge rental car, part of my two and a half hour fitful, shivering pseudo sleep at an Idaho rest stop. It was also written before the Coeur d’Alene Marathon that I ran at 6:30 AM Sunday morning. Details and photos of that run will hopefully be posted tomorrow. But in the meantime…
I’m making my way to Spokane. The sun has set but as I gaze out my window the horizon has that blue haze of afterglow. The land mass some 30,000 feet below us is dotted with lights — cities, towns, installations, beacons of civilization to tame nature, to control the night.
Steve and I were talking recently about the frontier life of yore, how night was different then in that no matter what torches, lamplight or other illumination one had, it could only go so far into the wilderness before being consumed by the dark.
Earth still has pockets of darkness but the light pollution of billions of inhabitants, coupled with night vision technology and thermal imaging means we do not look at the night and dark in the same way our forebears did. Times change, technology alters perspective and we roll on. What the future holds we cannot say definitively… But as Ed Wood once famously wrote in Plan 9 From Outer Space — the future is where we will be spending the rest of our lives.
I’m in a bit of a delirium due to a 4 am wake up on Saturday to get down to Long Beach for the marathon there. I caught about a 45 minute power nap upon my return home but it kinda only sapped my energy. I still think it was the right choice to skip a hotel tonight and endeavor to power through to the Coeur d’Alene marathon on Sunday but I have to admit — I’m not making a whole lot of sense.
To be continued…